I
For years my consciousness of this small piece of collaboration has
been very vague, almost impalpable, like fleeting visits from a ghost.
If I ever thought of it, and I must confess that I can hardly remember
ever doing it on purpose till it was brought definitely to my notice
by my Collaborator, I always regarded it as something in the nature
of a fragment. I was surprised and even shocked to discover that it
was rounded. But I need not have been. Rounded as it is in form, using
the word form in its simplest sense--printed form--it remains yet a
fragment from its very nature and also from necessity. It could never
have become anything else. And even as a fragment it is but a fragment
of something else that might have been--of a mere intention.
But, as it stands, what impresses me most is the amount this fragment
contains of the crudely materialistic atmosphere of the time of its
origin, the time when the _English Review_ was founded. It emerges from
the depths of a past as distant from us now as the square-skirted, long
frock-coats in which unscrupulous, cultivated, high-minded _jouisseurs_
like ours here attended to their strange business activities and
cultivated the little blue flower of sentiment. No doubt our man was
conceived for purposes of irony; but our conception of him, I fear, is
too fantastic.
Yet the most fantastic thing of all, it seems to me, is that we two
who had so often discussed soberly the limits and methods of literary
composition should have believed for a moment that a piece of work in
the nature of an analytical confession (produced _in articulo mortis_
as it were) could have been developed and achieved in collaboration!
What optimism! But it did not last long. I seem to remember a moment
when I burst into earnest entreaties that all these people should be
thrown overboard without more ado. This, I believe, _is_ the real
nature of the crime. Overboard. The neatness and dispatch with which it
is done in Chapter VIII was wholly the act of my Collaborator’s good
nature in the face of my panic.
After signing these few prefatory words I will pass the pen to him in
the hope that he may be moved to contradict me on every point of fact,
impression, and appreciation. I said “the hope.” Yes, eager hope. For
it would be delightful to catch the echo of the desperate, earnest and
funny quarrels which enlivened those old days. The pity of it is that
there comes a time when all the fun of one’s life must be looked for in
the past.